Heavy Calculations

We’re sitting in our hotel room and my husband is glaring at the computer and muttering complaints.

You see I say “the” computer.  Actually, it’s my computer  My husband’s own laptop got squashed under his footrest on the flight over here.  It now sports a lot of wiggly bright lights and a black blot straight out of a Dali painting.  He’s still chapped about it, but has made up for it by hogging my computer a lot of the time.  That’s marriage for you.

But right now, he’s enraged with the hotel’s Internet service.  Which strikes me as crazy, I tell him.  You come to Italy for the food and the stunning scenery and the design; you do not come to Italy for the efficiency.

“They just sent somebody up here to fix it,” he says.  “He had a phone line.  Not a computer line.”

So, my husband had marched down to the desk to straighten them out about high-tech concerns.  “I wasn’t snotty,” he reported.  “But the woman got all defensive, anyway.”

Oh, sure, I think.  I know what my husband is like when he’s “not being snotty” about high-tech matters; he usually comes across as being — what would the word be? — oh, yes!  “I bet you were patronizing as hell,” I say.

He ignores me.  I wonder why he is focusing on something so unimportant when — thanks to him — I am quite traumatized.  When we got to the hotel, I had hopped on the scales.  I knew I’d been packing away the pasta and the limoncello (my new drink of choice: it’s sweet; it’s alcoholic; I’m in love).  So I just wanted an idea of how things were going.

“What’s the conversion from kilograms to pounds?” I asked my husband.

“Two point five four,” he said with an air of authority.

Two point five four?  I did the math.  Then I had to sit down.  I never weighed that much even when I was ten months’ pregnant with my firstborn.  “There’s no way that can be right,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” he said.

“Can’t be.”  If we had the Internet, I could look it up.  But we don’t.  I open my Italian-English book and look under “health.”  They talk about all kinds of really insignificant details like hospital emergencies and the translation for “I believe my liver has just failed and I need a transplant.”  But nothing about a vital issue such as, How much, exactly, is a kilogram in real weight? Some health section.

My husband heads downstairs with my computer in a death-grip.  He’s going back to talk to the woman behind the desk about the hotel’s joining the 21st century, he announces.  I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, I sit in the room, doing a variety of calculations.  Even though my husband is a scientist and always remarkably sure of himself, this 2.54 business is clearly in error.  It is unacceptable.  I compute my weight at 2.44: Still unacceptable.  2.34: better, but not great.  Unless, say, I want to spend the rest of our time in Italy on a bread-and-water diet.

Finally, I trudge downstairs to the lobby, where my husband is commandeering my computer.  There’s Internet in the lobby, as it turns out.  Through a combination of sighs and guilt-inducing remarks, I finally wrest it away from him.

There, I find that my old email account has been hacked.  On the way back to the room, I get stranded in the elevator and realize my Italian is insufficient to convey: “Help!  I’m claustrophobic!”  Finally, I extricate myself and head upstairs.  A bit of bad luck — and all that.

But the good news is: The conversion from kilograms to pounds is two point two.  My weight is fine, my trip is saved.  I can hardly wait to tell my husband it’s a damned good thing he didn’t try to convert it with pi.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)